1: Imagine a beautiful summer morning on Lake Erie.
“The sun’s out, but there’s just enough breeze to keep you comfortable. It’s not too hot and not too cold,” Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer write in their powerful book Conversations That Win the Complex Sale.
Erik is lying in a hammock right by the beach. He’s reading a good book. On the table next to him is a cold drink and some salty chips. “It’s a pretty good life,” he’s thinking.
At which point, Erik’s five-year-old son Brett walks up. “Let’s play,” he says.
Erik knows that they have a week together. He knows there will certainly be lots of time to play. He’s also thinking that “there’s no guarantee that the weather will be like this again, and no guarantee that there will be this perfect hammock time again.”
Brett walks over, stands by the hammock, and starts talking. “He’s talking about something fairly random, as five-year-olds so often do,” the authors note.
“Erik pretends that he’s paying attention. He tries to give Brett yeses and nos in the right places. Every once in a while, Erik gives Brett a ‘that sounds cool.'”
At a certain point, Brett realizes his dad isn’t really paying attention to him. So now, he starts to push on the hammock to make it swing. . . Brett pushes the hammock harder. He keeps it up until Erik can’t ignore him anymore.”
Erik puts down his book and looks at Brett, who has a giant smile on his face. With this, Brett fully captures Erik’s attention. Erik smiles back at him and gets up from the hammock. And they go play.
2: This situation that Brett faced, wanting his dad’s full attention and Erik pretending to give it to him, is what sales professionals run into every day.
“Your prospect didn’t wake up this morning and say, ‘I hope a salesperson calls me today, stops me from doing what I’d planned, and gets me to do something different.'”
No chance.
“Your prospect has things that they are trying to accomplish,” Erik and Tim explain. “They often aren’t looking to make a change. Their focus is on things other than your message. And even when you feel you have their attention, they are often just faking it.”
Getting people’s attention is hard.
“There is a ridiculous volume of people, ideas, and things, all clamoring for attention to the point that it can be overwhelming,” the authors note.
The key question is: “In a world in which there is so much competition for your prospect’s attention, how do you stand out? How do you get and earn your prospect’s attention?”
It’s even more challenging than just getting someone’s attention. Keeping someone’s attention is an entirely different issue. “Just because your prospect agrees to the first phone call or the first meeting,” the authors note, “doesn’t mean you’re going to have their attention throughout the sales cycle.”
The research shows that you may not have the prospect’s full attention even during that first face-to-face meeting.
“Just as Brett had to work hard to get his dad’s attention, even though he was talking to his dad and standing right next to him,” Erik and Tim observe, “you need to work for every moment of your prospect’s attention.”
Because “whether you know it or not, your prospect is in a ‘hammock’ that’s just as real as Brett’s dad’s hammock, even though it’s invisible,” they note.
3: Neuroscientists did a study where people were given a list of words. They were told, “You can look at this list of words once, then we’re going to take it away, and we want you to write down every word that you’re able to remember.”
The results? People remembered 100 percent of the words at the end of the list.
Which makes sense: “Those were the last words they saw,” Erik and Tim reason, “they ought to be able to remember them best.”
That type of thinking would suggest that the words at the beginning were the hardest to remember because they were learned the farthest back in time.
But that’s not what happened. People only remembered 20 percent of the words in the middle and 70 percent of the words at the beginning.
“You’re more than three times as likely to remember the information that was at the beginning of that list than the information that was in the middle. Why?” the authors ask.
“What the researchers have discovered is that at the beginning of anything, your brain is so awake, alive, and alert, and there are so many more neurons firing than there are later on, that you’re able to capture information and get impact from information much more effectively.”
This has a profound impact on how you structure your time as a salesperson.
What happens at the beginning of most business-to-business sales presentations?
Many salespeople start with: “Here’s our founder, here’s our history, this is when we started; here’s our company headquarters and our office locations; here are all of the products we’ve ever developed; and here are the logos of a bunch of our customers.
Erik and Tim observe: “By the time you’re actually ready to talk about the customer’s problem and differentiate your product or service as a solution to that problem, where is that information being delivered?” Unfortunately,you are in the 20-percent zone, where your prospect has tuned out and is not paying attention.”
Clearly, this approach needs to change if we want to maximize impact.
You want to begin by establishing a sharp understanding of the prospect’s business challenges, communicating the power of your solution, and showing what makes you unique.
“And you need to do that at the beginning of your meeting,” they state. “And then, when you get to the close, you want to do the same thing. You want to make sure that you’ve built to a crescendo, orchestrating the biggest impact that you can with that prospect.”
Erik and Tim call this “the Hammock.”
“In part, this is because the graph looks like a hammock, and in part, it’s because you need to recognize that your challenge is to keep your customer’s brain from wandering or going to sleep during your messaging.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Am I earning my prospect’s attention—or assuming I already have it?
Action: Rework the first five minutes of your next conversation to focus immediately on your prospect’s challenges and what they can do differently with your solution.